


Eight Red Candles

by Traxits



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 05:52:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7422412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Traxits/pseuds/Traxits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elena had never expected to see Reno paying even lip service to a feast day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eight Red Candles

**Author's Note:**

> None of this is based in canon. It’s all old headcanons of how religion in FF7 might manifest, sort of based on what little we saw of the worship of Leviathan in Wutai.

Reno was lighting candles, Elena realized, after a minute of watching him. It had taken her a minute to figure out why Reno was fighting with matches instead of using the lighter. Her eyes drifted across the room toward the calendar, and she squinted to read the date from where she was. She was trying to absorb as much of the scene as she could without him spotting her.

She had never expected to walk into work on a feast day and spot Reno lighting eight red candles, arranged in pairs, in a pattern that she knew was for someone’s memory. Soul candles. He swore as the match burned too low and singed his fingers, and Elena hesitated before she crossed the room. He was just standing back up, the burnt-out match in his hand, when she stepped beside him.

His jaw tensed. She immediately held up her hands, offering him as disarming a smile as she could manage. “I’m not going to ask,” she promised. “I just wanted to offer to help.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and then he shoved the matches into her hands. “I shake,” he muttered, and she nodded. Plenty of people shook when they lit candles for someone’s memory. She slid one of the matches out and struck it across the rough strip on the side of the box. The match burst into life in her hand, and just before she touched it to the candle, Reno added, “Tessa.” When she glanced back at him, he waved a hand. “That’s… that’s the name.”

She nodded, and she lit the third candle (he’d managed the first two before he’d burned himself), and she repeated the name in her head. Tessa. She lit the fourth candle. Tessa. She shook out the match and lit a new one for the fifth candle. Odin, the all-father. Then the sixth. Guide your Tessa back into the planet. She shook that match out too.

Each match was only supposed to light one pair of the candles for souls. Some part of her wasn’t surprised at all that Reno had managed to burn himself trying to light more than two with a single match.)

Another strike and she lit the seventh. Allow Tessa the warrior’s rest that is deserved. And then the eighth, and she didn’t shake out the last match. Instead, she licked the forefinger and thumb of her free hand and put it out.

Reno had slid down into the chair he was perched in. His eyes were sharp over her movements as she gathered the matches and slid the matchbox closed. She placed it in the middle of the candles.

“You look like a priestess,” he said, and she lifted her head as she dropped the matches themselves into the small bowl beside the candles. At the end of the day, the sticks would be burned until nothing was left. Soul-sending was not something taken lightly, even by those who didn’t subscribe to all the trappings. “You really not gonna ask?”

She shook her head and sat on the edge of the desk beside him. She looked at her watch to mark the time. The candles were supposed to burn for twenty-one minutes before they were extinguished. “I’m not going to ask, Reno,” she promised, no matter how much she desperately wanted to know. Soul-sending wasn’t something that one did for casual acquaintances, for victims, for targets. It was intensely private, meant for family, for those closest to you. She lifted her gaze back to the candles.

Reno leaned forward, then suddenly moved and flipped the chair around until he could straddle it, until he could prop his chin up on the back of it. She couldn’t stop herself from glancing down at him. Of all the people in the office who might have decided to light the candles, she hadn’t been expecting it to be him. Honestly, she hadn’t been expecting to see soul candles set out at all. She’d burned her own that morning before work out of nerves that they might not be there in the office, out of nerves that she might be the only one who used them. That they were some kind of test for the rookie.

Her eyes narrowed as she watched Reno fold his arms, the movement placing his right hand over his left bicep. She wouldn’t have noticed it at all had he not gripped his upper arm just a little. She cut her gaze away from him the moment she realized that his lips were moving slightly, a wordless prayer. She shivered. No, she hadn’t expected this at all.


End file.
